Monday, July 22, 2013

The little tuckshop lady with big ideas

I've started studying for my Masters of Arts in Creative Non-Fiction at UTS.

So far, I'm loving it. One subject down, eight more to go, two years and lots of study ahead before I put that MA after my name.

My first subject was simply 'Non-Fiction Writing'. Myself and 15 fellow classmates were lucky enough to have Gabrielle Carey for our tutor. Gabrielle was tough, fair, approachable and authentic. The class was a solid foundation for exploring non-fiction writing as a genre and getting a sense for which direction we may each want to head.

We had two assignments to submit - a 'place' assignment and a biography of someone who had a public profile.

I chose Nahji Chu as the subject for my bio and was rewarded with her generosity, creativity and a new perspective on the very public issue of refugees.

At 2,300 words it's longer than your standard blog post. So grab a cup of tea, find a comfortable seat and come with me as we enter the world of Miss Chu:

Over the past six years, Nahji Chu has emerged as a creative and
culinary pioneer in Australia’s urban food scene. In 2006 she started selling
rice paper rolls made in the kitchen of a home she rented in Balmain.Today her empire, whimsically
named ‘misschu’, includes four tuckshops in Sydney and two in Melbourne. She
employs more than a hundred people. Her delivery team, a fleet of pushbikes and
motorbikes, dispatch more than 6,000 rolls each day. The business has an annual
turnover of $20 million.

A little girl’s face decorates every misschu item – from the company
letterhead to the delivery riders’ uniforms. The face of the brand, that little
girl, is Nahji. The photo is a copy of her visa application from when she and
her family, fleeing wartorn Laos, arrived in Australia in 1979 as refugees.
Nahji was nine years old.

Nahji’s
grandparents were originally from Vietnam but relocated to Luang Prabang in
Laos when a plague destroyed their farm. Vietnam and Laos shared centuries of embattled
history as larger countries’ armed forces fought to occupy pockets of
Indochina. It was under this shadow that Nahji, one of six children, was born
in 1970.

Luang
Prabang sits in the foothills of forested mountains and limestone cliffs, on
the banks of the Mekong River. The city is a patchwork of riverbank gardens,
rice paddies and wide streets. French colonial buildings and ornate Buddhist
temples sit next to traditional bamboo and wood houses.

Food was
pivotal, not just for survival, but for the role it played in bringing the
community together. Preparing the family’s meals meant a daily trip to the
market for Nahji and her grandmother, mother or aunt. One of Nahji’s earliest
food memories is that of her favourite dumpling dish Bánh cuốn – a Vietnamese crepe made from rice starch and stuffed
with minced pork and shredded vegetables. Her grandmother would sell the
pancakes on the side of busy streets, to make money and feed the family.

Indochinese
culture is steeped in traditions surrounding arts, crafts, food, language,
festivals and rituals. Daily life was punctuated by Buddhist and harvest
traditions. Each April Nahji looked forward to the New Year ‘Songkran’ festival
– a celebration of purity, clarity and new beginnings. To literally wash away
the old year and to prepare for the new, people swapped armaments and farmers
tools for buckets of water and united in a city-wide water fight.

In April 1975
the world changed for Nahji and the people of Indochina. The Vietnam War erupted.
Laotian communist forces (the Pathet Lao) struck out against American forces in
a bid to gain control of Luang Prabang. Hostilities threatened not just the
livelihood, but the lives of the Chu family.

More than
a quarter of the entire Laotion population fled in a mass exodus. The Chu
family split up to increase their chances of survival and used various means of
escape. Her father smuggled Nahji into a canoe and, with three other men, left
Luang Prabang in a daring escape along the Mekong River. Other families’ young
children were given opium to keep them quiet. Nahji was gagged to make sure she
didn’t unwittingly notify the authorities of their escape attempt. After a
terrifying ordeal, narrowly avoiding detection from the Pathet Lao, they arrived
in Northern Thailand and found refuge in one of four refugee camps.

The
culturally abundant city of her childhood was replaced with a muddy, makeshift
community filled with tents, bamboo huts and desperation. ‘There is no order in
a refugee camp,’ says Nahji, “the walls of the tents were made of mosquito nets
and we had to get water from the well”. Meals often consisted of watery rice without
any vegetables or herbs. Occasionally they would also eat eggs. Daily routines
revolved around collecting water and firewood and then boiling water for
cooking and bathing.

Despite
the desperate situation they now faced, the refugees retained their traditions.
The festivals that signposted the Laotian calendar were still acknowledged in
the camps. Nahji’s short animation ‘Autumn Moon’, made in 2011, demonstrates
the sadness and hope underpinning the rituals. Refugees in a camp prepare for
an Autumn harvest parade, making dragonfly and star-shaped lanterns out of sticks
and leaves. After the festivities, as the refugee children and their families
lay down to sleep, one child says to her mother ‘Next year I’ll make a frog’.
Her mother replies ‘Hopefully we won’t be here next year’.

Fortunately
the Chu family was reunited, reuniting in one of the four refugee camps that
Nahji was to stay in. Nahji’s parents and grandmother worked tirelessly on the
process of applying for refugee status in Australia.

Meanwhile,
Nahji and her siblings found entertainment everywhere. The New Year ‘Songkran’ festival
was still celebrated in April. No-one in the camp was safe from the being
doused by buckets of water. It was during this festival one year that Nahji
encountered her first white person – an American soldier. ‘I remember we were hiding, waiting for the next person
to come along.’ Nahji reminisces, smiling broadly, ‘This happened to be the
first white soldier we ever saw. He was on a motorbike, approaching us and we
yelled “Ambush! Ambush! Throw the buckets! Everything!” We pulled him off his
bike, saw he had a beard and we said “Oh my god, look at all the hair! This
person’s weird. He’s a westerner. Argh!” For us it was really freaky to come
across this white person’.

In March 1978,
three years after they arrived in the refugee camp, the Chu family was flown to
Australia. They were processed through the Villawood detention centre and stayed
in a hostel in Bass Hill in NSW. Nine of them slept in the same room – but the
walls and roof were solid and they had immediate access to running water. ‘We
had a tap with running water to ourselves, a house, not shared facilities,’
Nahji told Marie Clare magazine in 2011, ‘My parents said “We’ve made it, we’ll
be fine.” That tap was a very powerful experience’.

Refugee
services found work for Chu’s father on a farm in Cessnock, in rural NSW. As
the first Vietnamese family in the area, the Chu family’s arrival caused quite
a stir and was announced in the local paper. Curious, well-meaning neighbours
brought the Chu family gifts of food, clothing and blankets, helping them to
set up their new lives.

Two years
later the Chu family’s application for public housing was approved and they moved
to Melbourne. They settled in Richmond, which was fast becoming a Vietnamese
stronghold in Melbourne’s cultural landscape. However, locals were not as
welcoming as those in Cessnock. “We were like mushrooms sprouting and I think
it was seen as quite a threat to the local community,’ said Nahji.

Nahji assimilated
into her new life and culture. She did well at school, but didn’t get the
grades to train as the journalist she wanted to be. She pursued other creative
avenues – writing, acting, filmmaking, photography – always trying to find a
way to tell her story and that of other refugees. ‘Everything I set out to do in my life was
based on my circumstances, around the trauma of having come here as a refugee.
And the trauma of the assimilation process of coming to live in Australia. And I
really wanted to document it,’ said Nahji.

Food
was always a fallback option, as a way of making a living. Her Aunt Yen had
joined them in Melbourne and had started her new life from a simple bowl of
soup. She first sold pho (beef noodle soup) to other Vietnamese refugees in the
area, and eventually opened Indochine - one of the most popular Vietnamese
restaurants in Melbourne’s Box Hill. While Nahji tried to find a job that would
fulfil her storytelling desires, she worked in her aunt’s restaurants. She also
worked for Melbourne hospitality icons Italian chef Maurice Terzini and caterer
Vernon Chalker.

Nahji
relocated to Sydney in 2004, to move away from hospitality and to reinvent
herself. ‘I always wanted to steer away from food because I didn’t want to be a
Vietnamese woman doing the typical thing, where I just sell Vietnamese food,
that’s all I’m capable of,’ she tells me when we meet on Anzac Day this year, ‘I
didn’t want to be that person’.

She
found a job as a credit analyst – a role that won the admiration of her family.
Nahji says ‘Going to work in an office was exciting and exotic, and for me
seemed to be “I’ve made it”. A lot of Asian families are proud to say “She
works in an office. She doesn’t work on the floor making things with her hands,
she’s not physically on the ground”’. However glamorous her new role seemed, Nahji
became frustrated with the processes and politics of corporate life. She still
felt the need to find a way to tell her story.

Nahji
explains, ‘When it became apparent that all I’m capable of is selling you Vietnamese
food, it was a cold reality for me. It was all, the reality is, this is how
you’re going to make your living. Because every other path is going to be
really difficult for you’.

She
worked casually in the Sydney catering scene and saw an opportunity amidst the
mini pizzas, blinis and other carb-loaded canapés that were popular at the
time. In 2008 she started making traditional Vietnamese rice paper rolls, filled
with light, fresh ingredients and bold flavours. At first, she made them at
home and sold them wholesale. She came under scrutiny for how expensive her
product was, but she remained uncompromising about either the cost or quality
of her food.

Word
spread and the orders kept coming in. A government grant, secured through the
New Enterprise scheme, gave Nahji the opportunity to grow the business. She
moved to a commercial kitchen on Darlinghurst’s Bourke Street, to be closer to
her catering customers. So many people stopped by, asking if they could buy
lunch, that Nahji opened a cafe at the front of the kitchen. She told Smart Company
magazine, in January 2013, that she ‘called the new cafe a “tuckshop” because
she didn’t want people complaining about the service and the fact nobody spoke
English’.

The café’s success catapulted Nahji into the public spotlight.
Crowds snaked along Bourke Street. The press used her self-made,
headline-friendly title ‘The Queen of Rice Paper Rolls’. The public gave her a
few different names, comparing her to Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi – a character whose
food was so good it was worth offensive service. Stress and dealing directly
with the public forced the diminutive Nahji to revert to her cultural roots.
Her Vietnamese tone and nature was not always understood by the Australian
public. She quickly gained a reputation for being blunt.

Nahji had no patience for customers who didn’t understand the new
menu or have the right change. One very busy lunch hour, in 2009, Nahji ordered
a dithering customer to step aside until she knew what she wanted. The
affronted woman complained ‘You are the rudest person I have ever met!’. Having
heard something about a new social media platform called Twitter, Nahji
precociously snapped ‘Well, why don’t you go and tweet about it?’. The
customer, with uncensored brutality, tweeted a message to the public -
unleashing a virtual storm in the new social media teacup.

Since then, Nahji has harnessed the power of social networking. The
misschu Facebook page has become an essential two way conversation with 12,000
of her customers who ‘like’ the page. It’s also a platform for Nahji to use
humour to break down the barriers posed by racism. Members of the public
complain a few times a year that her home delivery service slogan, ‘You ling,
we bling’, encourages racism. Nahji replied to one of the most recent
complaints with a Facebook post, ‘My staff and I joke about our Vietnamese
accent all the time. It makes us all laugh and we love it that our customers do
too! It breaks down the barriers faster than any silent racist undertones I see
so often as a Vietnamese growing up in Australia.’ Ever the straight-talker - she
tagged the disgruntled Facebook user and commented, ‘Thank you for taking the
time to comment and please don't be so uptight’.

Nahji likes to challenge the status quo. Last year the mobile food
truck phenomenon posed a threat to her business. She focused on one of misschu’s
competitive advantages – the home delivery service. She updated the staff uniforms
- adding grey Vietnamese workmans’ jackets and personally stitching a cloth
patch onto right arm of each uniform. A two-wheeled ‘army of Chu’ was
dispatched across Sydney and Melbourne. The update was a strategic branding
move, says Nahji, ‘Let’s brand the delivery service now, let’s own it and
make them look really official. It was also playing on the whole communism,
propoganda thing. Accentuating everything that is Vietnam. So it was a play on
communism and fun’.

It’s these brave decisions that help Nahji Chu forge new ground.
‘The little tuckshop lady with big ideas’ is how she now signs off her emails. The
business has given her new opportunities. She has appeared on the ABC television
program Q&A, representing a refugee perspective. Her empire continues to
expand – she’ll open a new tuckshop in Manly in September, and, later this year,
will open her first tuckshop in London.

Despite global expansion of her misschu empire, Nahji’s focus
remains firmly on Australia. In her proudest moment to date, the Refugee
Council of Australia invited Nahji to be their Ambassador for Refugee Week
2013. She hopes that the public respond positively. ‘I plan to get on stage and say “Look Australia, I
think we need to take in more refugees,” she tells me, ‘and I hope they’ll say
“Let’s listen to her. She’s obviously smart, she’s done all these things, we
eat her food anyway, come on, let’s just see what she’s got to say. It might
just make sense.”’

Nahji has
captured followers with her food and hopes to capture minds with her story. For
a little girl smuggled out of her homeland 38 years ago, being heard is all she
has ever wanted.